Tuesday, 15 March 2011

Still images from video footage 14 March 14 2011 showing explosion at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex: on Monday a hydrogen explosion rocked the crippled nuclear power plant, where authorities have been scrambling to avert a meltdown following Friday's massive earthquake and tsunami: photos by NTV via Reuters TV/Reuters

A technician in protective gear looks out an automatic door with signs reading "No entry except for those with permission" at a makeshift facility to screen, cleanse and isolate people with high radiation levels in Nihonmatsu, northern Japan, 14 March 2011: photo by Yuriko Nakao/ReutersVicks Vaporub advertisement: Family Circle, 1 February 1958 (via Gallery of Graphic Design)

People queue to be screened by a technician in protective gear for signs of possible radiation in Nihonmatsu, northern Japan, 14 March 2011: photo by Yuriko Nakao/Reuters)

Association of American Railroads advertisement for atoms-for-peace program: Time, 15 September 1958 (via Gallery of Graphic Design)

Atomics International advertisement for nuclear research: Time, 17 September 1956 (via Gallery of Graphic Design)

A helicopter flies over Japan's Fukushima Daiichi No. 1 nuclear reactor, 12 March 2011. An explosion blew the roof off the the unstable reactor north of Tokyo on Saturday, Japanese media said, raising fears of a meltdown at a nuclear plant damaged in the massive earthquake that hit Japan: photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters

I have that creepy feeling, too, about all this, and it's getting creepier by the hour.

As an American youth in the early Cold War years, one experienced the curious disconnection between the "bad" kind of atomic power which you were taught to crouch under your school desk in hiding from, and the "good" kind which wise, humane engineering was about to deploy at large to improve life on earth for everyone (while of course making a profit for somebody, that was understood).

It was in the years just after that that the reactors were being developed and sold to power companies round the world.

Catanea,

Thank you for your good words and strong voice.

Artur,

In the event you ever need a ready-to-run reactor for your goatshed, you could probably get Marlin to come out and assess your set-up... Just cable "Atomics".

(It might do to to have a back-up estimate, though. As you say, there is something oddly untrustworthy about the look of him -- his having done -- or should one say gone? -- fission on State Street, one supposes him, like a character in a noir film with a dark scientific past, to be capable of trying to sneak in almost any sort of price-tipping isotope-soaked add-ons...)

And from what I understand, those now clinging to the cracking tree branch are being advised by authorities to Shelter Indoors.

Julia,

No, this brilliant species probably hasn't changed much since it first tumbled down from the trees and landed on its feet... wondering.

Such odd memories linger from that semi-hallucinated era of Atomic Tests, siren and alarm drills, etc.

When I was in secondary school the rumour spread that an alien craft had landed in the night in a northern suburb of Chicago, and left behind a mysterious building housing a nuclear reactor.

With some equally curious and slightly trepidated friends I proceeded to the rumoured location, where, lo and behold, there was indeed a large strange structure which no one could remember having been there before.

Seeing that Happy Valley reactor in the top image here reminds me that it was not merely provincial ignorance but an uncanny resemblance that caused us to make this mistake regarding the Bahá'í House of Worship in Wilmette (built in 1953).

No, not to worry with AIL&PC showing us the way, along with AAR, Aunty Eve, Marlin Remley and Prince Albert -- with friends like these who needs enemies? And yet, and yet, those Red Cross workers are standing there, being scanned for "signs of radiation". . . .

We thought of you and Johnny, it must be confessed, the father and tow-headed son, in that insidious first picture -- the advertising agency manipulation of innocence, marketing the atoms as though they were corn futures.

The fellow who took the picture of the abandoned Juragua nuclear plant said in his original caption he'd had no idea the place existed, no one had mentioned it to him, it wasn't on any maps -- but then one day, when he was out cycling on a back road, there it was...

Speaking of things that might make one turn green around the gills if pondered too long, here in what remains of California the present/imminent Japanese nuclear catastrophe has actually -- are you sitting down? -- been cited by at least one outspoken proponent of nuclear power in support of the "case" for building new infern... er, plants.

This from today's SF Chronicle:

"Nuclear advocates hope any public fears raised by the crisis in Japan prove short-lived, both in the United States as a whole and California in particular.

"'You can't run the grid that we have now and make the per capita carbon dioxide reductions you want without nuclear power,' said former California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore.

"While in Sacramento DeVore tried repeatedly, without success, to overturn the state's ban on new nuclear plants. He sees the events in Japan as proof that reactors - even in situations close to a worst-case scenario - pose less of a threat than opponents claim.

"'Here we have the largest earthquake in history to strike Japan, with perhaps 10,000 killed by the earthquake and tsunami, and there have been no deaths due to nuclear power,' DeVore said."

now, instead of getting my protein from aphids, I eat deer ticks and tse-tse flies I usually cook 'em up either in an aluminum pot or nuke 'em in the GE Microwave on weekends we have 'em barbecued and have 20-30 poets stop by

for disert we eat sugar-coated poems

so

toprovethat old

add-age: 'you are what you eat'& suffer the consequences at 'pay back time'

An irradiated world, with no bananas in it -- or worse still, with only the "new" genome-sequenced banana (which "science is racing to produce, but it will take twenty years") -- would it be a world worth living in?

So I went in and watched a bit of the NHK feed -- it's really hard to watch. A small group of soldiers was sorting through rubble for bodies, while some civilians looked on. A silent and mournful scene. A soldier discovered a body. He beckoned to an older woman standing nearby. Both prayed momentarily over the body.

Every day, the world over, large amounts of high-level radioactive waste cre- ated by nuclear power plants is placed in interim storage, which is vulnerable to natural disasters, man-made disasters, and to societal changes. In Finland the world’s first permanent repository is being hewn out of solid rock – a huge system of underground tunnels - that must last 100,000 years as this is how long the waste remains hazardous.

http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/

Radiation predictions according to weather folks:http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2011/03/us-west-coast-is-not-at-risk.html

"A hiding place that must last 50,000 years" is not an encouraging thought, since at present it does not appear possible to create a sanctuary that would protect the human species from the "fallout" of its own hubris, greed and myopia for five minutes.

But the futures traders have probably got all this covered, even now, deep in the devil's bunkers of their "souls".

What the weather blogger appears to be really saying in the piece is, Whew, we in Seattle are relieved to know that a strong Pacific jet stream is carrying the plume on a straight line across the northern Pacific, directed not at the Northwest US Coast, but directly through the Golden Gate.

The same sort of relief is being expressed in Vladivostok.

Aristotle speculated that the supreme human pleasure may be that of standing high and dry on the shore while watching a shipwrecked stranger drown in the waves.

(It would not be a tremendous surprise to see all the sanguine millennial "one world" propaganda quickly dissolve, as the world collapses, into the old, tried-and-true pragmatics of "I've got mine...")

The phrase 'brilliant morons' springs to mind: on the one hand, the ingenuity, curiosity and imagination that it took to 'harness' nuclear power; on the other hand, the imbecility of developing a power source that produces fantastically lethal by-products that have a shelf-life of thousands of years.

I'm pretty sure I remember reading about various types or radiation-emitting devices being used as casually as sunlamps, back in the days of the technology's infancy: acne? Have a radiation bath. Eczema? Some gamma rays'll clear that up but pronto. Halitosis? Suck on this lump of uranium.

And how about the Japanese geniuses who thought that building 100s of nuclear reactors in one of the world's most tectonically unstable areas was a good idea?

Worryingly for us here in the UK, France runs almost exclusively on nuclear power.

"The phrase 'brilliant morons' springs to mind: on the one hand, the ingenuity, curiosity and imagination that it took to 'harness' nuclear power; on the other hand, the imbecility of developing a power source that produces fantastically lethal by-products that have a shelf-life of thousands of years.

"I'm pretty sure I remember reading about various types or radiation-emitting devices being used as casually as sunlamps, back in the days of the technology's infancy: acne? Have a radiation bath. Eczema? Some gamma rays'll clear that up but pronto. Halitosis? Suck on this lump of uranium."

Those days all too well remembered here. With inward wince.

Routine "advanced" medical insanity of the period included subjecting the victims of a diagnosis of metabolic irregularity to having face encased in rubber mask while radioactive isotopes were administered to the thyroid. All I can say for this bit of acute torture, which I did actually endure, was that it was at least better than trying to imagine Annette Funicello's private life. (Though many years later I did read somewhere that the procedure involved an intake of radioactivity equivalent to swallowing ten Crispy Creme Bikini atolls, or something.)

(As for the fate of Madame Curie, she was generally assumed to have been a Saint of some magnitude, her radium poisoning thus comparable with stigmata, torments of the stake & c.)

And about d.&c. -- the past week of one's inner life has indeed been spent ducking and covering from sepia-toned flashbacks to the Golden Years of the American Century, when in our little parochial school secret lives of terror duck and cover drills were the common order of the day.

"And how about the Japanese geniuses who thought that building 100s of nuclear reactors in one of the world's most tectonically unstable areas was a good idea?"

I've been thinking about this, too.

Currently, as the IAEA has noted with a nearly audible silent shudder, every "method" and "technique" being tried, all the water-flooding and water-dumping and steam-inducing, & c., is being made up on the fly, none of it has been tried before, nobody knows what's happening, and the Dark Unknown is proving to be a less than pleasant place.